Salt Lake City Criminal Defense Law Blog

The Supreme Court of Utah recently upheld a prosecutor's decision to charge a man with aggravated murder in connection with a fatal beauty salon robbery. This case arises out of the 2007 robbery of a Salt Lake City beauty parlor.

The defendant reportedly entered the salon, ordered everyone on the ground, displayed a gun, and then demanded money. The defendant allegedly ordered one of the workers to get money from a back room, but then shot her when she emerged from the back room with a gun of her own. The defendant was apprehended by authorities after fleeing to Mexico.

This week we looked a recent heroin possession case in which a Utah man attempted to overturn his conviction on the basis of a trial court's refusal to instruct a jury on the elements of possession of drug paraphernalia. An appeals court found this instruction was unnecessary because drug paraphernalia possession is not a lesser included offense of heroin possession.

"The elements of the two offenses do not overlap because each offense requires proof of different elements to sustain a conviction," the court noted.

A Utah appeals court recently declined to overturn a man's drug possession conviction. The man was convicted after authorities allegedly found him in position of a contact lens case that contained a cotton ball with traces of heroin on it.

During the trial, police officers testified that it is common to find heroin users with cotton balls. Heroin is supposedly liquefied through heating and then strained with a cotton ball to remove any impurities before it is injected.

A Salt Lake City appeals court recently upheld the burglary conviction of a man accused of breaking into a UTA bus to steal transfer slips. The man appealed his conviction claiming that there was insufficient evidence to support it.

Appealing a verdict based on the sufficiency of the evidence is extremely difficult, but not impossible. The standard for criminal convictions is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and a criminal appeals court views all appeals regarding a verdict in the light most favorable to the verdict.